Before you buy that tiny box turtle in Chinatown, know that it can live for 100 years. Which means that among all the Mad Libs nonsense of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles — a comic book-turned-media-phenomenon that’s always half-admitted it’s a goof — at least the teenage part is accurate…
Incompatible fronts collide in director Steven Quale’s weather-horror patience-tester Into the Storm. The first is the summertime yen for righteous kablooey, the dumber the better, exemplified here by drunk galoots hauling ass into a twister on a four-wheeler ATV, tossing beer cans and whooping about getting a “million YouTube hits.”…
Star presence, that distillation of charisma and sometimes glamour, lies at the heart of the movies’ appeal. The star presence James Harvey evokes so richly in his new book, Watching Them Be, is never simply about physical beauty. Harvey rightly points out that Ingrid Bergman’s fresh unaffectedness was distinctly unglamorous,…
In the highly imperfect world of contemporary romantic comedies, What If is as close to perfect as anything we’ve got, not least for the way it captures the abject hopefulness of young people who’d like to be in love but don’t know how to go about it. Who does know…
Even those of us who loved Robin Williams as a performer would have to say that sometimes he was too much — too wired, too pleading, too on. There were times when I’d see him nattering away on a late-night talk show, or suffer through a performance like the one…
Emma Stone and Colin Firth in Magic in the Moonlight.On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of the Village Voice and Amy Nicholson of L.A. Weekly discuss Woody Allen’s latest, Magic in the Moonlight, and revisit Get on Up and Guardians of the Galaxy, and…
On this week’s , Stephanie defends her Guardians of the Galaxy review against internet trolls who tell her to go suck eggs, and we touch on Scarlett Johansson in Lucy and the excellent James Brown biopic Get on Up. There’s a lot to be had in this one. Enjoy…
Beware the movie that’s Fun! with a capital F, the one populated with seemingly unpretentious characters that say adorable, clever things, the one that presents each off-kilter joke as if it were a porcelain curio, the one that boasts a comfort-food soundtrack of songs you’ve always liked but perhaps haven’t…
“The heart wants what it wants,” Woody Allen has taught us, and apparently what his heart wants these days is not to have to bother with writing second drafts of film scripts. His latest, Magic in the Moonlight, plays like a sumptuous vacation, its stars larking in ’20s finery about…
He couldn’t have known it at the time, but James Brown’s debut recording and first chart hit — made in 1956 with the Famous Flames — is a question that contains its own answer. The lyric to “Please, Please, Please” speaks, pretty obviously, of sexual desire. But Brown’s voice is…
Mood Indigo is bitter candy, a heartbreaker that uses sugar as a trap. The director, Michel Gondry, has a brilliant, contradictory brain. He’s a swoony pessimist, a big-dreaming romantic who believes in love at first sight but never lets his films end with a kiss. Instead, his idea of a…
James Brown stripped pop to its rhythmic essentials: the groove and the grunt, the bridge and the scream. Tate Taylor’s Get On Up likewise reduces James Brown — and the biopic form — to all that matters most. Here are the highs of the man’s life, both artistic and recreational…
Fandom is a weird beast. It can make otherwise sane individuals do things that not even a lifetime of drinking will erase from memory. Some extreme fans of Supernatural seem to fit into that category. For those of you who aren’t in the know, it’s a show on The CW…
On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, Amy Nicholson of the L.A. Weekly and Stephanie Zacharek of The Village Voice interview film critic and author Karina Longworth, who’s just launched a fascinating new podcast on the history of Hollywood called You Must Remember This. Karina talks about the movies and…
Philip Seymour Hoffman is an island of rumpled calm in Anton Corbijn’s urgent A Most Wanted Man, a glum-out-of-principle espionage story based on a John Le Carré novel. The role demands that Hoffman be quiet, steady, occasionally frustrated, and that he hold secrets — often from us, which is a…
Uncomfortable-silence auteur Joe Swanberg has made a career of testing how much falseness you can strip out and still have a movie. What if people on-screen talked like people off it, and if their moments of realization — this is the person I love! — worked out about as well…
With his stately drawl, Morgan Freeman has narrated nonfiction documentaries about penguins, slavery, the lemurs of Madagascar, ancient Egyptian pharaohs, and the expansion of the universe. His is a voice of authority tempered by warmth and wisdom, capable of evoking felt human experience and the majesty of creation. In writer-director…
One could be forgiven for being skeptical that a Hercules movie starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and directed by Brett “Rush Hour Trilogy” Ratner might have a brain in its head, but it actually does. We’re not talking Snowpiercer levels of intelligence, but it’s far less aggressively stupid than, say,…
Dallas-based Jeremy Snead has a hot commodity on his hands these days. He’s the director, writer, and producer of Video Games: The Movie, a documentary on the history of video games. With his production company MediaJuice, he successfully raised over $100,000 through a Kickstarter campaign, got Zach Braff to be…
The business of childhood is the business of waiting: waiting for Christmas, waiting for school to let out, waiting to be old enough to stay up past 9 p.m. No other movie I can think of better captures the wistfulness of those days full of waiting than Richard Linklater’s Boyhood,…
Wish I Was Here, the movie that actor and second-time director Zach Braff partially funded with money raised through Kickstarter, isn’t nearly terrible enough to satisfy all the grumblers who are hoping to see it fail. When Braff couldn’t secure traditional financing for the film, he appealed to the fan…
It turns out that the cars and planes of Cars and Planes can kiss. Deep into Planes: Fire & Rescue, a time-killing kid-flick whose title is an exact summary of its plot, the filmmakers introduce us to two creaky old Winnebagos, a husband and wife in their sunset years, revisiting…
